Conrad Black: The British Commonwealth will rise again

The British Commonwealth will rise again

John Baird and his British analogue, William Hague, should be congratulated on their innovative arrangement to share embassy facilities. Some opposition members of Parliament’s first utterances about the plan evinced their fear that Canada would be assumed to be retreating back into colonial subservience to Great Britain — but that’s just evidence of their congenital sense of inferiority. For those preoccupied with the relationship between this country and the United Kingdom, precisely the opposite inference should have been drawn. Canada and Great Britain are historically and ceremonially linked G-7 powers, both among the 10 or 12 most important of the world’s 195 independent states. They are perfectly capable of collaborating on a basis of complete equality.

And this is exactly what has been agreed. In Haiti, the British will insert staff into the Canadian embassy. In Myanmar, when the boycott of parliament ends and democracy arrives, Canada will spare itself the great expense of a new embassy by placing its personnel in the same building that houses the British embassy. The official estimate is that by replicating this system in a number of secondary capitals, Canada could save $80-million; no sane person could do anything but applaud such a move. Diplomats rarely suffer from overwork and much of the cost of foreign representation returns little value to the taxpayers.

As it happens, this pooling of some costs with Britain could prove a foretaste for increasing co-operation between Canada and the U.K. in the future. I have written here before of the advantages to a stronger association between the principal Commonwealth countries, as the world’s alliances and groupings shift in response to several seismic global changes, including the apparent redefinition by the United States of its role and strategic interests. This requires a certain amount of intuition and sleuthing, as Barack Obama keeps repeating that the United States is as involved in the world, as ever. Of course this is palpable rubbish as the United States routinely declares developments all over the world to be “unacceptable” and then accepts them in practice, and reduces its defense outlays while ceasing to make any credible statement of determination to influence events in areas where it was formerly intimately involved. Tactically and politically, it may be better and easier to withdraw noiselessly while denying that that is what is happening, but it makes foreign policy planning for other countries more complicated.

The only discernible objectives of U.S. foreign policy now are to do something about global warming and to see a Palestinian state. There is nothing wrong with an American retrenchment, as long as it is orderly and doesn’t constitute a complete abdication, and there is no present suggestion of that. The country has chronic fiscal and monetary problems and nearly 20% of the workforce is unemployed or under-employed. It is certainly time for the United States to put its own house in order, and not being over-exposed to the vagaries of foreign affairs is a good place to begin.

The United States only departed isolation in 1940 when president Franklin Roosevelt recognized that if Nazi Germany was enabled to consolidate its control of Austria, most of Poland, France, Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia — and assert suzerainty over most of the rest of Europe except the Soviet Union, the British Isles, and Switzerland — it would be a mortal threat and rival to the United States; and that if Japan was not restrained, it could assist in the dissection of Russia and would threaten the entire Pacific and Indian Ocean basins. Roosevelt declared the policies of “all aid short of war” to Britain and Canada, and later the U.S.S.R,, and the oil and metal embargo against Japan, which brought the United States into the war. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill extracted guaranties of the independence of Eastern Europe from Stalin, on all of which Stalin reneged, provoking the Cold War. And Roosevelt invented the United Nations not only for idealistic and universalistic reasons, but to disguise American hegemony in much of the world behind an international organization and to reassure his isolationist countrymen that the world was not so dangerous a place as it had been.

In fact, it was, but all the subsequent U.S. Cold War presidents subscribed to the view that if the United States was not engaged in Western Europe and the Far East, those vital regions could fall into the hands of America’s enemies. With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the capitalist evolution of China, the United States doesn’t have any serious enemies left, only some pockets of terrorist provocation and peevish local mountebanks like Chavez and Castro. No one will disturb a relatively inward-looking America.

Russia, with less than half the population of the old U.S.S.R, and barely a third of the old Warsaw Pact, is in no position to threaten Western Europe, and China is not militarily belligerent. Though assertive and rising, it is already meeting resistance to any overlordship from its neighbours. Co-operating with India; Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and even Myanmar, and Taiwan are unanimous in their determination not to be cowed by China, and with a little diplomatic and military assistance are perfectly capable of ensuring a regional balance. The Russians and Chinese can exchange acerbities over Mongolia.

However the Eurozone may be reconfigured, the principal political fact of Western Europe will be that Germany will be the basis of a hard-currency, economically efficient core of Western Europe. This powerful and cohesive unit will include the Netherlands, Austria and probably the Finns, Czechs, Danes, Swedes, Baltic republics and Poland. France will behave as France does, agitating rather operatically with the Italians, Spanish and others, while Russia drifts, tussled over by competing parties of nativists and Western emulators, the ancient dispute between Peter the Great and Yeltsin on one side, and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Putin on the other.

There will be regional powers like Brazil and Turkey, but the only other coherent force that could arise and occupy a role somewhat analogous to a great power of old would be some cohesive bloc of Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Singapore and perhaps a few other Commonwealth countries. The talented Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, is capable of advancing along these lines, and Stephen Harper and John Baird would do well to explore these possibilities also. Whether the pooling of embassy buildings with the British leads in this direction or not, this question has again revealed the propensity of the official opposition to jerk the knee and shoot from the hip — its stock response to most happenings, great and small.

Note: Thanks to reader Mark Goetz for pointing out that Canada ran 12 consecutive federal government surpluses and not 14 as I wrote last week. I apologize for my error.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.